The Emergence of Linguistic Person in Spanish–Speaking Children

Abstract

Data from 3 children (2 male, 1 female) acquiring Spanish are explored for the development of linguistic person in an inflectional language. Contrastive use of person, tense, and number and the presence of overt subjects and overt objects are examined. Recent claims that person emerges before tense and number and that the latter license overt subjects are not supported. Each of the 3 children follows a different route in the development of person, tense, and number. The data challenge any theory positing uniformity across children, proposing a maturational sequence of innately endowed categories for person, tense, and number, or claiming that Universal Grammar links the emergence of any of these with the presence of overt subjects.

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